All 2 entries tagged Tracking Visitor Locations

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December 12, 2013

A Virtual Location Move with my ISP Switch

Follow-up to Locations provided for DSL visitors are much better but still flawed. from Rob McGonigle on Internet Search & SMEs

virtual location of by IP addressSearching for a local service with blocked drains Solihull I noted that I saw some Oxford company Ads and local listings.

I had just changed my Internet Service Provider from PlusNet to BT. For years my fixed IP address resolved to London. When I repeated the trace my virtual location had moved west up the M40 / A40 to Cowley, outside Oxford.

I have blogged before about how the fixed wire UK broadband services were catching up slowly in their ability to detect location information from a very poor base. Many may say this is a good thing in the light of Edward Snowden’s revelations and today’s announcement that the NSA used Google’s search preferences cookies to track people.

On the other hand it can be easier to search for local services when the search engine knows where you are. I saw a student using a bleeding-edge gaming PC turn to his android phone to search for ‘taxi’. It produced the best results.
So location-based search in the UK has moved to moblies. A restaurant search in a new city is the classic application as well as location-triggered vouchers and offers.

Its surprising that BT can’t resolve my IP address to the new box in a green in Whitley, Coventry, after rollout of their new fibre-based network!


April 27, 2009

Locations provided for DSL visitors are much better but still flawed.

Follow-up to Problems with Location based Search Marketing in the UK from Rob McGonigle on Internet Search & SMEs

I have been running two accounts with UK location targeted campaigns. I have blogged in the past about how this was completely broken in the UK by the limitations of BT’s wholesale ADSL network.

My own campaign still demonstrates this problem and I cannot see my Ads here in Coventry as my fixed IP address still appears to be in London.

DSL Visitors from LondonThe other campaign was remarkably sucessful so I have researched this in more detail. Looking at the 2009 stats from the WMCCM site’s Analytics revealed that 685 different cities have been recorded way up from three. DSL provided about 50% of the visitors so I created 2 Analytics ‘advanced segments’ UK DSL and UK Non-DSL and drilled down to the cities.

London provided 44% of the DSL visitors (about 22% of all visitors) but only provided 26% of the Non-DSL visitors (13% of the total). There is still clearly significant over-reporting of London visitors using DSL

Looking at the Network Locations for any city shows reveals a better picture of the Internet Service Providers and IP pools than the three big centres of 2 years ago. Looking at the picture for London highlights 2 potential groups for over-reporting, see picture right, and click for a larger image.

Single static IP addresses is the largest number and includes my Coventry based IP address. The Carphone Warehouse also stood out. Their traffic resolved to 50 cities but 77% of that was recorded as London. TalkTalk do have some unbundled local loop equipment in BT exchanges, Lambeth was their no.2 location, so the bulk are probably also static IPs provided wholesale by BT.


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